Hindemith from the Recording Horn

Happy May Day! Some fifteen months ago, when I uploaded the Los Angeles Wind Quintet's recording of Hindemith's delightful Kleine Kammermusik, I expressed the hope that I might someday be able to hear the work's first recording, an acoustical version by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Quintet, anachronistic as that may seem. (It was one of Polydor's very last acoustical recordings.) Well, my wish has been granted, for a copy has recently come my way, and you, my loyal audience, get to hear it too:

Hindemith: Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Wind Quintet
Recorded c. 1925
Polydor 66376 and 66377, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 43.10 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 26.09 MB)

The performance is very good, especially considering that the work was written (and published) a mere three years before this recording was made, and its idiom would have been equally new to the Leipzig players - who, Jolyon tells us (in connection with his very welcome upload of their recording of August Klughardt's Quintet), were Carl Bartuzat, flute; Walter Heinze, oboe; Willi Schreinicke, clarinet; Gunther Weigelt, bassoon; and Richard Schaller, horn. Only Bartuzat's year of birth is known for sure, and he was thirteen years older than the composer. This was the first recording of a work by Hindemith in which the composer himself didn't actually perform, and the playing, like Hindemith's own, is spirited and in certain spots a bit rough-and-ready. Enjoy!

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (Ormandy)

In 1937, the name of Leopold Stokowski must have seemed inextricably bound with that of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as far as record buyers were concerned, for it had appeared so for nearly 20 years on Victor Records. The set I present today heralded a new order, for it was the first-issued recording by the Orchestra under its new music director, Eugene Ormandy (he and Stokowski were actually co-conductors there during his first two years), just arrived from Minneapolis:

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74  ("Pathétique")
Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Recorded December 13, 1936, and January 9, 1937
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-337, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 98.34 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 68.09 MB)

This recording, as well as that of Schumann's Second Symphony, was made during Ormandy's first two sessions with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first two of over 400 sessions he would undertake with them over the next 46 years. Information about these comes from a marvelous new volume by Richard A. Kaplan, "The Philadelphia Orchestra: An Annotated Discography" - published just this year by Rowman & Littlefield. Kaplan believes that the Philadelphia Orchestra's move to Columbia in 1943 was more than anything else a strategic move on Ormandy's part, and indeed the evidence shows that Victor was not particularly interested in promoting him. Stokowski continued to record with the Orchestra through 1940, even after Ormandy had become the sole music director, and then there was Toscanini's ill-fated series of sessions with the Orchestra in 1941-42. Small wonder that Ormandy jumped at the chance to move to Columbia, where he quickly became the star attraction.

The evocative cover design pictured above was not original to the set, but a wartime reissue. I have borrowed the image from Ken Halperin's marvelous site Collecting Record Covers, for my own copy of DM-337, a slightly worn pre-war edition, has a generic cover.

Stravinsky: Petrouchka (Coates)

Another Albert Coates birth anniversary is upon us (April 23 - Thursday, this year), so for this week I present his version of Stravinsky's Petrouchka. This is only the second recording ever made of that great ballet; Eugene Goossens' pioneering acoustical version with the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, which Satyr has available, was the first. Coates' recording would have been intended to replace it, of course:

Stravinsky: Petrouchka (complete ballet)
London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates
Recorded October 19 and 24, 1927, January 5 and February 15, 1928
HMV Album 54 (D 1521 through D 1524), four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 100.66 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 60.12 MB)

It's worth noting that this is one of the few Coates recordings made by HMV that did not get issued in the USA by Victor - an honor that even most of his acoustical recordings enjoyed. I presume that is because Koussevitzky recorded the Suite from Petrouchka at about the same time, as his first recording with the Boston Symphony, and Victor considered the Coates set, complete though it was, superfluous. (Victor had issued the Goossens recording in 1925.)

Happy Birthday, Gregor Piatigorsky!

Unsigned cover design for Columbia MX-258

This Friday, April 17, marks the 112th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, Gregor Piatigorsky (1903-1976). For a musician of his stature, he left far too few solo recordings - a handful for German Odeon in the late 1920s, all of short pieces, and a somewhat more substantial batch for HMV in the 30s (including a Beethoven sonata with Schnabel, and a Brahms with Rubinstein). But it wasn't until the 40s, when he came to America, and signed on with Columbia, that more of an effort was made to commit his repertoire to disc. These two sonata recordings are among the fruits of that association:

Beethoven: Sonata No. 5 in D Major, Op. 102, No. 2
Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Ralph Berkowitz, piano
Recorded June 6, 1945
Columbia Masterworks MX-258, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 39.14 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 30.53 MB)

Brahms: Sonata No. 2 in F Major, Op. 99
Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Ralph Berkowitz, piano
Recorded May 28, 1947
Columbia Masterworks ML-2096, one 10-inch LP record
Link (FLAC files, 66.00 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 44.94 MB)

Almost twice as much music was recorded by Piatigorsky for Columbia as was actually released. There were unissued versions of the Grieg, Debussy and Barber sonatas - this last-named, Columbia actually went so far as to assign a set number for (MM-737), and both Piatigorsky and Barber were eager to have it released. My guess is that a suitable filler side could not be agreed upon. These sonata recordings finally saw the light of day in 2010, with the issue of a six-CD set by West Hill Radio Archives, a set that is indispensable for lovers of Piatigorsky's art, and which, when last I checked, was being sold at Berkshire Record Outlet at a reduced price.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture (Stokowski, 1942)

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
(portrait by Ilya Repin, 1893)

For Easter weekend, and in celebration of Leopold Stokowski's birth month (April 18, 1882), I present one of Stoki's more controversial interpretations, that of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1888 Russian Easter Overture. Controversial, because it features one of his many retouchings of orchestral scoring - and this in a work by a composer renowned for his mastery of orchestration! In this case, an anonymous male voice substitutes for a trombone in the recitative-like middle section, singing words of the Russian liturgy:

Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture, Op. 36
NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Recorded April 23, 1942
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-937, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 33.71 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 23.40 MB)

This brilliant piece must have been particularly dear to Stokowski, for he recorded it no less than four times - in 1929 with the Philadelphia Orchestra; the present version; in 1953 with "his symphony orchestra"; and in 1968 with the Chicago Symphony. The 1953 recording also uses the voice-for-trombone substitution; there, the singing is credited to bass Nicola Moscona. (Moscona can be heard on this recording of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony.)

A happy and blessed Easter to everyone!

Mozart: Horn Concerto No. 4 (Dennis Brain)

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss

Today I present one of the earliest solo recordings by the tragically short-lived horn virtuoso Dennis Brain (1921-1957), which may not be particularly rare, perhaps (most of his recordings have been widely reissued over the years), but it is wonderful, and putting it on this blog is an excuse to put another delightful Steinweiss album cover into the public eye! This is, for all intents and purposes, the recording that introduced Dennis Brain to the American record-buying public (as a soloist, that is - the Léner Quartet's version of a Mozart divertimento, in which he and his father Aubrey had augmented the ensemble by two horns, had been issued here in 1940). It was the first to be made available as domestically-pressed discs obtainable through regular channels, some four years after it was released in England:

Mozart: Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-Flat, K. 495
Dennis Brain, with the Hallé Orchestra
conducted by Malcolm Sargent and Laurence Turner
Recorded June 21, 1943
Columbia Masterworks set MX-285, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 51.45 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 32.16 MB)

The double conductor attribution requires some explanation. The story is that Sargent was late for the recording session, so Turner, the orchestra's first violinist, took over and conducted the recording while waiting for him to arrive. English Columbia solved the problem of wording the record labels in a most frustrating manner for record collectors, by leaving off the conductor's name(s) entirely. At least they were honest, I suppose. Victor, when issuing Stokowski's 1939 recording of Saint-Saëns' "Carnival of the Animals" with the Philadelphia Orchestra, credited everything to Stoki, even though one of the sides was a retake conducted by Saul Caston.

William Boyce: 8 Symphonies (Max Goberman)

Max Goberman

The Philadelphia-born violinist and conductor Max Goberman (1911-1962) was a true recording pioneer. He will probably always best be remembered for being the first to attempt to record all the Haydn symphonies, a project cut short less than halfway through by his untimely death from a heart attack, a month shy of his 52nd birthday. (My first-ever exposure to the Toy Symphony that we used to believe was by Haydn was through Goberman's recording of the piece for Young Peoples Records, a company for which he made important contributions in the late 1940s.) Goberman's first major recording project was undertaken with a chamber orchestra he helped found, the New York Simfonietta, and comprised the first-ever recording of the eight symphonies by William Boyce:

William Boyce: The Eight Symphonies
(edited by Constant Lambert)
The New York Simfonietta conducted by Max Goberman
Recorded c. 1937
Timely set 1-K, nine 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 156.17 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 94.87 MB)

Max Goberman was the musical director for Timely Records, a small New York-based company founded around 1935 and originally specializing in political material, which in 1937 was sold to an insurance executive named Leo Waldman. Waldman changed the focus of the label to esoteric classical material, and this Boyce set was the first issue under his aegis. Within two or three years the label was defunct, its assets sold to General Records' owner Hazard Reeves, the famed sound engineer.

The Boyce symphonies were available in those days only in an error-ridden edition by Constant Lambert, who himself would record extracts from them in 1940 as part of a ballet, "The Prospect Before Us." At the time of his death, Goberman was working on a new edition of the symphonies, which has since become the standard.

Incidentally, the 52nd birthday that Max Goberman didn't get to celebrate is a landmark I expect to reach this May. Furthermore, Goberman died a mere five months before I was born. Eerie, isn't it, that Fate should place these records in my hands at this time of my life!

Two More by the Coolidge Quartet

Robert McBride

I recently acquired two more recordings by the Coolidge Quartet (William Kroll and Nicolai Berezowsky, violins; Nicholas Moldavan, viola; Victor Gottlieb, cello), and with them, I am about halfway to having a complete collection of the issued commercial recordings of this unjustly neglected ensemble. For the first one, which is the only single-record issue in the Coolidges' discography that I can trace, they are joined by Arizona-born composer-oboist Robert McBride (1911-2007), who gained some fame as a young man for writing pieces with catchy, evocative titles such as "Jingle Jangle", "Swing Stuff", etc. Arthur Fiedler promoted him on records with the Boston Pops before discovering Leroy Anderson (Youtube has his recording of "Fugato on a Well-Known Theme" here). His Oboe Quintet, despite its academic title, inhabits the same lighthearted world; it's in a single jazzy movement marked With kick:

Robert McBride: Quintet for Oboe and Strings (1937)
Robert McBride, oboist, with the Coolidge Quartet
Recorded October 27, 1939
Victor 2159, one 10-inch 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 13.52 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 8.70 MB)

The other Coolidge item here is more self-explanatory; it's the third installment of their ill-fated Beethoven quartet cycle:

Beethoven: Quartet No. 3 in D Major, Op. 18, No. 3
The Coolidge Quartet
Recorded October 27, 1939
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-650, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 45.64 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 30.68 MB)

Brahms: Symphony No. 2 (Barbirolli)

John Barbirolli, c. 1940

Surely one of the hardest acts to follow in the history of orchestras and their conductors was Toscanini and his ten years as music director of the New York Philharmonic (1926-36). 37-year-old John Barbirolli was chosen for the job, and achieved fine results in the seven years he was there. When he arrived, the orchestra still had a recording contract with Victor, but the company seems to have done little to promote the Philharmonic - perhaps understandably, when they also had Boston, Philadelphia and Toscanini's new orchestra at NBC on the books. When the contract lapsed in 1940 Columbia eagerly signed the orchestra and its young music director, no doubt with an eye to recording it with other conductors in their stable, especially Stravinsky and Bruno Walter. But to Barbirolli, rightfully, went the honor of conducting the Philharmonic's first recording for Columbia, and here it is:

Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73
Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York
conducted by John Barbirolli
Recorded March 27, 1940
Columbia Masterworks set MM-412, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 93.74 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 63.90 MB)

At just over 33 minutes long, this may well be the fastest Brahms Second on record, yet it never sounds rushed.